T.S. Eliot

Here is an article in the guardian about this writer and his relationship to the Bloomsbury Group. I chiefly remember Eliot as the author of the cat poems.

For me, it's his "The Wasteland" which he dedicated to Ezra Pound (one of the best poems I've ever read), "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and his "Four Quartets", with Burnt Norton (air), East Coker (earth), The Dry Salvages (water), and Little Gidding (fire).

ETA: great photograph...wasn't Hughes a handsome divvil! Interesting perspective on Eliot liking the minutiae of daily life and his rejection of the supposed 'freedom' the grant would have given him.

>>2 tiffin: - I agree with you about Eliot's poetry Tiffin. Those are my favourites too. I've been thinking of going back to his work recently.

I have a sense though that Eliot might be one of those writers who's work I love, but who I might not have liked in person. I have a sense of a cold fish, and quite an intolerent man. And sometimes some hypocracy in regards to his religion.

Peter Ackroyd wrote a very good biography of him, and when I read it, in the 80s, I loved it, but not the man it contained. I don't know whether I would feel the same as a maturer woman, bearing in mind I might have been a callow 20 something then!

And you are right about Hughes, I love that run of photographs from that evening. I have a postcard of one somewhere.

Essay about T S Eliots recently published letters:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/07/eliot-letters-book-review

This seems to have fallen off my post above, the photo that accompanies the original article, of TS Eliot with Virgina Woolf, when visiting Garsington.

http://www.lyndallgordon.net/images/eliot-woolf.jpg